turtledovefandomcom-20200216-history
Kuusamo
Kuusamo was a kingdom located on a large island off the southern coast of Derlavai. It shared the island with Lagoas, with which it shared long history of emnity. The Kuusamans are proud of their heritage of having been in their land before the Kaunians and the Lagoans came; a chant to this effect is recited as a ceremony before classes and before spells. Instead of a king, Kuusamo is ruled by seven hereditary princes who share power between each other. The largest city is Yliharma. Before the Kaunians and Algarvic tribes came to the island from Derlavai, Kuusamans were nomadic pastoralists who herded reindeer, but adopted settled agriculture from the immigrants. Kuusamo was involved in a war with Gyongyos over the possession of islands in the Bothnian Ocean when the Derlavian War started; they stayed neutral until the second year of the war, when Kuusamo declared war against Algarve over the massacre of Kaunians for their life force. The Algarvians retaliated with a magic strike against the capital city, killing two of the Seven Princes. Kuusaman theoretical sorcerers had been pursuing a unity between the Two Laws, of Similarity and Contagion, even before the war started. After it began this investigation was patronized by the Seven Princes, and used to develop magecraft that would be used to counter the Algarvian sorcery derived from the murder of Kaunians. The Algarvians launched a sorcerous attack at the researchers, killing Siuntio, the premier theoretical sorcerer of the age. Eventually, the Kuusamans invented an extremely powerful spell based on the inverted unity of the Two Laws (their spells worked by releasing energy from twisting time itself) and used it to destroy Gyorvar, the capital of Gyongyos. Literary Comment "Kuusamo" is a town in Finland, and many of the names of people and places are Finnish. In terms of physical appearance, Kuusamans more closely resemble East Asian people. Kuusamo is described as being far more open and easy-going than any other society on Derlavai. While there is no mention of any type of constitutional government, citizens have functional freedom of speech and it is mentioned that Kuusamo has a tradition of press freedom, for they allow their news sheets to be much more candid about military matters than other kingdoms. Women are also allowed to do virtually anything that men can do, in contrast to the rest of Derlavai where traditional gender roles are firmly enforced; a example of this being Pekka, a female theoretical sorcerer, who helped create the special bomb that destroyed the Gyongyosian capital. In relation to the war with Algarve, Kuusamo most closely resembles the United States insofar as the U.S. was initially neutral in World War II and only entered because its territory was attacked. The Seven Princes only declared war on Algarve when Algarvian mages began using their murder-powered sorcery against Unkerlant. Kuusamo is also the least autocratic of the known Derlavaian countries, being ruled by seven princes rather than a single monarch, and having a kind of federal structure, with each of the princes ruling one of the sub-sections. (It is still by no means a democratic republic.) However, Kuusamo was already in a war with Gyongyos while the US entered only after the Japanese, which Gyongyos is based on, attacked her territory. In other respects, however, Kuusamo is very different from the United States. Rather than being descendants of immigrants who came to settle a new land, Kuusamians have a deep sense of being the first, original inhabitants of their land. In principle they regard everybody else on their continent - including their Lagoan neighbours - as interlopers who would "go away" one day, even though they had long since given up trying to actually do something about it. Kuusamo